Gospel & Universe 🪐 Ars Moriendi
Like Flies to Wanton Boys
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With Flu, at 100 Degrees
Even in the harshest light, with pounding head and bloodshot eyes, I'd rather see.
In death, we may be the same as limestone
or silicon in space ten billion years away.
So breathe, albeit smog-choked air.
Those who live are here to feel the moment and give it meaning,
for in the vast scripts and logs of time
numbers are but numbers and cannot breathe.
So smell the moment's air, though it smells like burnt rubber and doesn’t care.
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Death, Be Not Proud
Avoid death, but don’t fear it.
If you’re an atheist, then it doesn’t make any difference if you return to the specks of dust that made you — molten fire or black lead, dirt beneath the woodchuck’s paw, or photon in an alien’s eye.
If you believe in a Merciful God — the only God worth believing in — then the afterlife is a party and everyone’s invited. Everyone. Saints, sinners, agnostics, surprised atheists, and everyone else who couldn’t see what couldn’t be seen.
If you’re an agnostic, just wait and see, seizing the day. The two possibilities above — molten fire or volcanic martinis — will operate, one way or the other. All you need to know in the meantime is beauty and truth. Forget about patience, for it presupposes that the atheist is wrong, or that the party will serve your brand of beer. Forget about dread, for it waits upon the semblance of horror in a chaotic dream. So seize the day. See the beauty that’s around you, and revel in the truth, without pretending that it’s anything more, or anything less, than it is.
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116 Fathoms Deep*
Portside (Into Darkness)
Looking into the dark water, the blue gleam / that he thought was from a nether strand / (of stranded mermaids, candles, and rum) / was only the light of the moon,
bobbing in its lust for solid land / and for a castle with a moat and keep. / As a wave crashed across the deck, / he reached for his sextant to see if this was doom,
for he feared that hope was but the figment of a dream / in a vast and watery universe of sleep.* / Who among us can see the stars and milky stream / as clearly as a doomed sailor gaping at the deep?
If this be error, and upon me played, / I thought too deeply and my thoughts will fade.
Starboard (Into Light)
Scanning the vast water, the blue speck / he thought was from an angel’s heel / (as he fell to plain and fire and burning stake)* / in fact was light, like eiderdown to touch,
floating inside him so that he couldn’t see / what life was like without love and rank. / As the blue starlight washed over him, / he plucked the string of a harp for old Time’s sake,
and yet he knew no music could grace the deck / so sweetly as a beaten cross or weathered ankh. / Who among us knows the meaning of gold or wreck / like he who of the milk of Paradise has drank*
If this be error, and upon me weighed, / my words are dust and the stars will fade.
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* 116 Fathoms Deep. These two poems rework Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116”:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments. Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixèd mark, / That looks on tempests and is never shaken; / It is the star to every wandering bark, / Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come; / Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
* sleep. See Hamlet: “To die, to sleep; / To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause.”
* Angel’s heel. An allusion to the fall of both Achilles and Satan, but mostly Satan, who falls from Heaven after rebelling against God.
* the milk of paradise has drank. See Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”: “Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed, /And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
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